I’ll admit I foolishly allowed myself to be misled. Despite almost 40 years of practicing immigration law, I didn’t anticipate the robustly revanchist re-grabbing of lost immigration territory and status, or the truly audacious intent and breadth of the April 18, 2017 “Presidential Executive Order on Buy American and Hire American (BAHA).” As interpreted by officers adjudicating requests for immigration benefits at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), BAHA would “Make America Great Again” by taking us back to the pre-1965 days of racial and national origin discrimination, xenophobia, and jingoism, as was then embodied in America’s immigration laws.​

US 1965 Stamp Celebrating the 750-Year Anniversary of the Magna Carta

Reading BAHA’s scant immigration provisions last April, I viewed it then as much a brouhaha about nothing. It merely called for inter-departmental proposals outlining potential administrative and legislative changes to the H-1B visa category that would “help ensure that H-1B visas are awarded to the most-skilled or highest-paid petition beneficiaries,” and, “[consistently] with applicable law . . . [would] protect the interests of United States workers in the administration of our immigration system, including through the prevention of fraud or abuse.” Since none of these proposals could come into existence without new legislation or new rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act (requiring a lengthy period of notice and an opportunity for stakeholder comment), I surmised that nothing much would change in the short-term.

To be sure, I noted BAHA’s ominous enforcement-minded tone (“it shall be the policy of the executive branch to rigorously enforce and administer the laws governing entry into the United States of workers from abroad”). But it seemed to me that, given the long-standing “culture of no” and gamesmanship at USCIS, BAHA was merely a ritualistic shot against the bow signaling more of the same. Boy oh boy was I wrong. BAHA has apparently awakened USCIS immigration officers as if it were a dog whistle, a silent reveille alerting them loud and clear – just like their recently “unshackled” colleagues charged with immigration enforcement – that the cuffs are off. Since BAHA was issued, USCIS immigration officers seem to view themselves as henceforth free to apply even more “innovative” and superficially plausible, if extralegal and disingenuous, reasoning to deny work visa status and employment-based green cards at whimsy and will.

Six months ago I won the lottery — the H-1B visa processing lottery for skilled foreign workers. I called my thrilled parents and celebrated with friends. I’m from northeastern China and have an M.B.A. from Stanford, and was planning to stay in Silicon Valley to help start a company based on a promising new technology to improve the use of data. I was overjoyed because, historically, being selected in the lottery was a near guarantee that an applicant could remain in this country at least three more years.

But at the end of July, I received the dreaded Request for Further Evidence from immigration authorities. I provided the extra information that United States Citizenship and Immigration Services asked for. In September, I got another request. I complied again. Finally, on Oct. 11, half a year after my celebration, I learned I had been denied a visa.

After earning law degrees in China and at Oxford, after having worked in Hong Kong as a lawyer at a top international firm, after coming to United States three years ago for an M.B.A. and graduating and joining a start-up, I was given just 60 days to leave the country. I have 17 days left.

But who’d a thunk that adjudicators would target for denial foreign workers currently in lawful visa status applying to continue working in the same job with the same employer? After all, doesn’t BAHA’s § 1(e) define “workers in the United States” and “United States workers” as described in 8 U.S.C. § 1182(n)(4)(E), to include not only green card holders, refugees, and asylees, but also authorized immigrants? And doesn’t BAHA’s § 1(c) define “petition beneficiaries” in a future-focused way as “aliens petitioned for by employers to become nonimmigrant visa holders with temporary work authorization under the H-1B visa program”? (Emphasis added.)

Well I was both naïve and unimaginative, given that a new, post-BAHA USCIS policy memo has apparently stripped all currently authorized nonimmigrant workers of their status as protected “U.S. workers” under § 1(e). See, USCIS Policy Memorandum PM-602-0151, October 23, 2017 (“Rescission of Guidance Regarding Deference to Prior Determinations of Eligibility in the Adjudication of Petitions for Extension of Nonimmigrant Status”). In this policy memo, USCIS floated the spurious claim that its earlier 2004 and 2015 guidance (requiring that officers defer and approve, except in limited circumstances, all prior approvals of work-visa status as long as the job duties and employer remain the same) somehow shifted the burden of proof away from the individual and imposed it on the agency. This burden-of-proof argument rests on shaky terrain. Apparently, the effort is simply too much for USCIS, despite ever-escalating user fees “to obtain and review a separate record of proceeding to assess whether the underlying facts in the current proceeding have, in fact, remained the same.”

In other words, USCIS now asserts that merely doing its job, i.e., by reviewing a nonimmigrant’s entire case history, somehow shifts the burden of proving eligibility to the agency. Not so. The statutory burden on the petitioner or applicant to establish visa eligibility remains the same. Rather the minimal duty imposed on USCIS is to retrieve the prior file and read it. If that is administratively burdensome, then a reasonable new policy would instead suggest to stakeholders that, if deference to a prior approval is desired, then the petitioning employer must include a copy of the prior submission and approval notice with each request for extension of status. Problem solved.

I will decide all cases based on the evidence of record after having read the file carefully and applied the immigration laws, regulations and agency policy memorandums in a spirit of fidelity to Congressional intent and just compassion for the people and businesses who will be affected by my decision.

I will not issue requests for evidence merely as a means of pushing a case off my desk.

I will decide cases promptly and remember that justice delayed is justice denied.

I will not judge the case by the size of the company or the nationality of the applicant.

I will not issue decisions that contradict settled agency policy guidance unless a new law or a novel set of facts justify such action.

When I am duty bound to deny a case, I will provide a well-reasoned and detailed explanation of the grounds for my decision.

As immigration officials ponder my tender offer, I urge each of them to recall the oath of office as a federal employee. In the oath each of them did “solemnly swear (or affirm) [to] support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; . . . bear true faith and allegiance to the same; . . . take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and . . . well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which [s/he is] about to enter.”

I thus implore immigration officials not to destroy America to save it. I ask them to recall that our cherished American heritage stems both from the rule of law, first embodied some 800-plus years ago in the Magna Carta, and from our cherished exceptionalism as a nation of immigrants. If immigration officials nevertheless persist in savaging decades of immigration law and policy, then I urge them to consider my intentionallynonviolentreference to the Urban Dictionary‘s definition of the Latin phrase, sic semper tyrannis, perhaps wrongly attributed to Brutus (but also uttered very unjustly by John Wilkes Booth):

[Blogger’s Note: This post is submitted as a necessarily-lengthy formal comment to the November 20, 2015 draft guidance of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, PM-602-0122, interpreting the phrase, “the same or [a] similar occupational classification” as used in the “increased job flexibility” provisions of Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) §§ 204(j) and 212(a)(5)(A)(iv). This comment incorporates by reference the content of all hyperlinked words and phrases below. [By email: ope.feedback@uscis.dhs.gov[Attention: Hon. León Rodriguez, Director, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services[SUBJECT: Comment of Angelo A. Paparelli to Draft Policy Memorandum PM-602-0122, “Determining Whether a New Job is in ‘the Same or a Similar Occupational Classification’ for Purposes of Job Portability, Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) §§ 204(j) and 212(a)(5)(A)(iv), ” as provided in Public Law 106-313, the American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act (AC21).]

An Immigration Opportunity Lost:USCIS Stiffens on Job Flexibility

A frisson of fear coursed through me when I learned that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) would issue new policy guidance on “job flexibility” — the statutory right of some long-patient green card applicants to change jobs or careers within the same or a similar occupational classification. Congress introduced this limber possibility in the American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act (AC21), S.2045 , at a time when the legacy agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), still held sway over immigration-benefits decisions.The better way — APA Notice-and-Comment Rulemaking. In lieu of USCIS policy guidance, my strong preference would have been that the successor immigration agency pursue notice-and-comment rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). I worried that the more relaxed exercise of issuing draft policy guidance and inviting public comments would become yet another sad episode in the continuing manifestation, particularly in the last ten years, of America’s new form of extra-constitutional government, the Administrative State. Increasingly, the Administrative State — a form of government by bureaucracy “under which [federal] administrative agencies are able to push policy toward their preferences rather than being wholly faithful to their legislative principals” — has become the unwelcome default mode of lawmaking and governance in this era of Congressional impasse.The Road to Good Intentions. As USCIS forecasted in November 2014 (Item 4 in its list), the forthcoming interpretation would “[p]rovide clarity on adjustment [of status] portability [in order] to remove unnecessary restrictions on natural career progression and general job mobility [and] provide relief to workers facing lengthy adjustment delays.” (Emphasis added.) Despite these soothing words, I foresaw that an admittedly informal “flexibility” practice that had worked reasonably well under a generally relaxed interpretation announced in a series of five agency advisories, e.g., here and here, would ossify in the hands of the current crop of policy formulators at USCIS’s headquarters. Unfortunately, these fears have come home to roost. As this blog post and comment will show, the November 20, 2015 draft guidance, PM-602-0122, is as stiff and lacking in vitality as a corpse in rigor mortis.The Pre-AC21 Status Quo. When Congress enacted AC21, it added two provisions promoting “job flexibility” for long-delayed adjustment of status (green card) applicants. In doing so, the House and Senate tipped their hats to Buddha’s fundamental Law of Impermanence, the precept that, over time, stuff happens. In other words, as William Gladstone, the noted British statesman, reportedly said, “justice delayed is justice denied.”Congress knew when it passed AC21 that INS decisions on employment-based applications for adjustment of status, the benefit of gaining green card status while in the U.S., were taking far too long. In a predecessor bill to AC21, the “Immigration Services and Infrastructure Improvements Act of 2000” (S. 2586), Senator Dianne Feinstein, its lead author, along with several other senators, acknowledged what immigration stakeholders of the era had long known:

[Section 2](a) Findings.–Congress makes the following findings:. . .(3) The processing timesin the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s other immigration benefits [cases, i.e., other than naturalization applications] have been unacceptably long. Applicants for family- and employment-based visas are waiting as long as 3 to 4 years to obtain a visa or an adjustment to lawful permanent resident status.(4) In California, the delays in processing adjustment of status applications have averaged 52 months. In Texas, the delays have averaged 69 months. Residents of New York have had to wait up to 28 months; in Florida, 26 months; in Illinois, 37 months; in Oregon, 31 months; and in Arizona, 49 months. Most other States have experienced unacceptably long processing and adjudication delays. (Emphasis added.)

Clearly, Congress recognized when including in AC21 a “Title II” (also entitled, the “Immigration Services and Infrastructure Improvements Act of 2000”) that agency processing delays were forcing indentured adjustment applicants to wait years longer than the targeted 180-day period in the new law’s job-portability provisions:

[Sec. 202](b) POLICY.--It is the sense of Congress that the processing of an immigration benefit application should be completed not later than 180 days after the initial filing of the application, . . .SEC. 203. DEFINITIONS.In this title:(1) BACKLOG.—The term ‘‘backlog’’ means, with respect to an immigration benefit application, the period of timein excess of 180 daysthat such application has been pending before the Immigration and Naturalization Service. (2) IMMIGRATION BENEFIT APPLICATION.—The term ‘‘immigration benefit application” [includes] any application . . . to . . . adjust . . . status . . . under the Immigration and Nationality Act. (Emphasis added.)

Thus, the 106th Congress that enacted AC21 clearly knew about inordinate green card delays when it provided “job flexibility” relief to beneficiaries whose adjustment of status applications had been “long pending” — meaning those remaining unadjudicated for more than 180 days. Thus, it allowed a worker (sponsored for a green card in any one of four employment-based immigrant visa preference categories) to change jobs or employers after the adjustment application had been pending more than six months. The only AC21 condition imposed, however, is that the new position must be in the “same or [a] similar occupational classification” as the one described in the employer’s labor certification application or immigrant visa petition.Need for a Regulation. Undoubtedly, publishing a proposed USCIS regulation and allowing formal comment from stakeholders before finalizing the rule would be a welcome approach. To be sure, prior agency guidance left a few lingering ambiguities requiring clarification and did not establish procedures which could and should be formalized in the rulemaking process. For example, some adjustment applicants probably remained tethered unhappily to Employer #1 because they feared that USCIS might disagree about job similarity and refuse the long-awaited green card. Moreover, as I proposed in “‘Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow’: Musings on Adjustment of Status Portability” (Musings), Employer #2 gets a windfall, the hiring of an incipient permanent resident already granted open-market authorization pending the adjudication of the adjustment application. But Employer #2 might still lose if costly training which it provided is wasted or its project engagements are impaired by an adverse USCIS adjudication on the same-or-similar-job issue. Even worse, Employer #1 — the firm that did the heavy trudging through the red tape and suffered the time required to traverse trap-laden Department of Labor (DOL) and USCIS rules, incurring legal fees and other costs en route — becomes collateral damage in the war for talent as it loses the services of the the porting worker.The Equitable Solution — Cell Mitosis. APA rulemaking could thus provide necessary equitable relief to all three deserving parties (the adjustment applicant and Employer #1 on the one hand, and Employer # 2 on the other) by adopting some variant of the “cell mitosis” theory I proposed in Musings.Just as cells dividing through mitosis inherit cellular DNA, pipeline immigration benefits could likewise be “inherited.” If mitosis principles were to be applied, the porting employee and Employer #2 would win because their cellular “inheritance” endows green card status, and in an increasingly overheated labor market, the employment of an in-demand worker. But Employer #2 should not lose everything, given that the DOL’s test of U.S. worker unavailability for the position in question had already been passed. Instead, Employer #2 could “inherit” (a) the earlier “priority date,” the place in the immigrant visa waiting line, which Employer #1 had reserved for the departing worker, and (b) the right to petition for a comparably qualified non-citizen candidate to fill the same, now-vacant job and to help the new hire and his or her immediate relatives gain green cards through adjustment of status. Thus, subject to any waiting period in the green-card queue and the same numerical limits of the immigrant visa quota, the porting employee, his or her equally qualified substitute, and Employers #1 and #2, would ultimately gain salutary immigration benefits. Why? Because they earned them under AC21 and a flexible, job-flexibility final regulation — a rule well within USCIS’s regulatory authority to prescribe.To those at USCIS or elsewhere who might argue that Employer #2’s “inheritance,” as I’ve described it, would contravene the DOL regulation, 20 CFR § 656.12(a), prohibiting the “offer [of an approved labor certification] for sale, barter or purchase by individuals or entities,” this blogging promoter of applying mitosis principles in the immigration ecosphere would respond that that horse has already left the barn. In practical effect, AC21’s portability provisions already refute the DOL notion, also espoused in § 656.12(a), that an approved labor certification is not “an article of commerce.” The statutory and commercially-valuable right of adjustment portability effectively permits Employer #2 to “purchase” (though a “same or similar” job offer accepted by the porting worker) the intangible proprietary right to employ the individual as long as s/he has secured the interim adjustment benefit of a USCIS-issued Employment Authorization Card or another form of work permit.The Need for Transparency. An APA-compliant proposed rule would also make all stakeholder comments publicly accessible on Regulations.gov, and USCIS would be required to elucidate in writing its rationale for accepting some suggestions and eschewing others. This transparency is unlike the current USCIS practice which provides no access to public comments and no explanation of why stakeholder proposals to change draft guidance were accepted or rejected in the final policy. Regrettably, this behind-the-walls process of willful obscurantism is likely to apply to the finalized USCIS adjustment-portability policy once the comment period for the November 20, 2015 draft guidance (the Draft) expires on January 4, 2016.What’s Wrong with the USCIS Draft Memorandum? As a partial remedy to the agency’s opaqueness in declining to publish stakeholder comments on job-flexibility, this blog lists several objections and suggest improvements to the Draft:

1. The Draft ignores AC-21’s legislative history of abhorrence to immigration case backlogs and the resulting need for job flexibility. As noted above, Congress clearly saw and tried to mitigate the interrelated problems of bureaucratic delays and the likelihood of changed circumstances. Delays in adjustment processing had grown unreasonably — up to as long as 69 months. To lessen the foreseeable risk that changed job circumstances would cause the loss of green-card eligibility, Congress enacted a law which — in the words of USCIS quoted above — would ” [(1)] provide clarity on adjustment [of status] portability[,] [(2)] remove unnecessary restrictions on natural career progression and general job mobility, [and] . . . [(3)] provide relief to workers facing lengthy adjustment delays.”2. The Draft cherry-picks an especially strict definition of the word, “similar,” which AC21 left undefined. Although the USCIS cites Taniguchi v. Kan Pacific Saipan, Ltd., 132 S. Ct. 1997, 2002-03 (2012), for the principle that “when a term goes undefined in a statute, an agency ordinarily should ‘give the term its ordinary meaning,'” its proffered Draft violates the “ordinary meaning” principle. The Draft opts for the online version of a British dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary (OEM), publicly inaccessible except by paid subscription, which apparently defines “similar” as “having a marked resemblance or likeness.” USCIS also cites the second definition of “similar” in the American online dictionary, Merriam-Webster.com (MW), to mean “alike in substance or essentials” — a definition clearly less restrictive than the OEM‘s “marked resemblance” formulation. The Draft does not explain, however, why it omitted MW‘s first definition of “similar,” to wit, “having characteristics in common : strictly comparable [emphasis added].” Perhaps the omission is an example of the Administrative State where agencies “push policy toward their preferences.” This stricter definition, however, would contravene the Supreme Court more recent application of the rules of statutory construction, Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, a 2014 decision which restricted administrative-agency interpretations of statutes in the following words:

Under Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., . . . we presume that when an agency-administered statute is ambiguous with respect to what it prescribes, Congress has empowered the agency to resolve the ambiguity. The question for a reviewing court is whether in doing so the agency has acted reasonably and thus has “stayed within the bounds of its statutory authority.” . . . .Even under Chevron‘s deferential framework, agencies must operate “within the bounds of reasonable interpretation.” And reasonable statutory interpretation must account for both “the specific context in which … language is used” and “the broader context of the statute as a whole.” Robinson v. Shell Oil Co.A statutory “provision that may seem ambiguous in isolation is often clarified by the remainder of the statutory scheme … because only one of the permissible meanings produces a substantive effect that is compatible with the rest of the law.” Thus, an agency interpretation that is “[inconsistent] with the design and structure of the statute as a whole,” does not merit deference. (Citations omitted; emphasis added.)

Instead of requiring the stricter showing of “marked resemblance,” USCIS should give the phrase, the “same or similar occupational classification,” its ordinary meaning, namely that a job would be “similar” to another if the subject matter expertise required in each of the two jobs, or the stated duties, skills and qualifications, are fairly “comparable.” Thus, the Shakespearean comparison (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) would not withstand a reasonable “comparability” analysis, but an engineer employed in a huge multinational enterprise who morphs in today’s gig economy into a self-employed engineering consultant or a professor of engineering seeking multiple teaching assignments, in most cases should (not the permissive “may” in the Draft) be accorded AC21 job-flexibility benefits.3. The Draft misapplies and gives undue probative weight to the DOL’s Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system — a complicated, arbitrary and abbreviated composite of occupational classifications not developed for the legislative purpose of AC21 job-flexibility analysis. Rather the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) intended the SOC to permit statisticalanalyses for use by “Federal statistical agencies to classify workers . . . for the purpose of collecting, calculating, or disseminating data.” As the BLS explains the SOC system, however, its shortcomings for immigration adjustment job-flexibility analysis becomes apparent:

All workers are classified into one of 840 detailed occupations according to their occupational definition. To facilitate classification, detailed occupations are combined to form 461 broad occupations, 97 minor groups, and 23 major groups. Detailed occupations in the SOC with similar job duties, and in some cases skills, education, and/or training, are grouped together.

Although the Draft treats the SOC like a veritable Code of Hammurabi, or revered totem (“this memorandum instructs [Immigration Services Officers] on how they may use the [DOL’s] . . .SOC . . . codes”), USCIS should not prescribe it as the exclusive source of job-similarity comparisons.4. The Draft fails to offer reasonable alternatives to the SOC. USCIS should offer a variety of alternative ways in which job-similarity, with the SOC listed as merely one of other acceptable measure of comparability, can be established by the “preponderance of the evidence” standard of proof. For example, given that USCIS views the DOL as authoritative in the evaluation of job comparisons, then the AC21 flexibility analysis should also allow use of the Labor Department’s easily applied “substantially comparable” job or position test used in 20 CFR § 656.17(i)(5)(ii) of its PERM labor certification regulation:

A “substantially comparable” job or position means a job or position requiring performance of the same job duties more than 50 percent of the time. This requirement can be documented by furnishing position descriptions, the percentage of time spent on the various duties, organization charts, and payroll records.

The application of a “substantially comparable” or the equivalent “more than 50%” rule is already familiar to Immigration Service Officers who must routinely apply this test in many other visa categories. Consider the L-1A nonimmigrant and EB-1(3) tests for intracompany or multinational managers or executives whose employer must show that the foreign candidate has been and will be “primarily” engaged in managerial duties or executive responsibilities. Similarly, treaty-based E-1 visa applicants must show that the treaty national or entity is “principally”engaged in trade of goods or services between the treaty country and the United States. USCIS interprets the adverbs, “primarily” and “principally,” as requiring a greater than 50% bright-line test. Indeed, the “preponderance of the evidence” test applicable in virtually all immigration-benefits decisions is itself a “more than 50%” test. Furthermore, the “substantially comparable” test is much more easily and quickly decided than the abstruse SOC system. As 20 CFR § 656.17(i)(5)(ii) notes, the “substantially comparable” measure “can be documented by furnishing position descriptions, the percentage of time spent on the various duties, organization charts, and payroll records.”5. The Draft expressly supersedes all job-flexibility discussions in five prior INS and USCIS advisories. By revoking prior guidance, the Draft makes it uncertain whether earlier pronouncements allowing self-employment as an approved basis for adjustment portability, holding that multinational managers or executives can port and/or disregarding as irrelevant any issue of whether Employer #2 can satisfy the otherwise applicable standard of “ability to pay” the wage stated in the labor certification or immigrant visa petition will reappear in the final job-flexibility policy guidance.6. The Draft offers no explanation of procedures to tee-up the granting of a request for adjustment of status job-flexibility benefits. Given the Draft’s revocation of the prior adjustment portability policy memos, USCIS fails to say whether the usual way to invoke adjustment portability — the adjustment applicant’s submission, after having ported, of a letter from Employer #2 demonstrating job similarity — will continue to be required. The Draft also offers no clue whether USCIS will establish, before a porting occurs, a form-based process for the adjudication of a prospective change of job or employer. Clearly, USCIS should obviate the need for the current bet-the-green-card procedure whereby the adjudication of job similarity is only available after a change of job or employer has already occurred. Hence, the Draft’s lacunae of guidance on procedures and its dubious over-reliance on the SOC makes job moves by the adjustment applicant still the risky business it has always been.

* * * * *

President Obama and USCIS deserve praise for their desire to help adjustment applicants change jobs or employers more freely. Unfortunately, however, the agency’s chosen vehicle of movement — an unduly cramped interpretation of AC21’s job flexibility provisions, coupled with its unwarranted fixation on the SOC — will freeze in place AC21’s intended beneficiaries and thereby impair the virtuous economic goal of enhanced worker mobility. The USCIS should scrap the Draft and publish a proposed job flexibility regulation.

Terabytes of text have already been generated in the course of extolling or excoriating President Obama for his November 20 Executive Actions on Immigration. The prolific foaming of bloviating mouths has mostly been prompted by the promise of deferred action and work permits for undocumented immigrants under the DACA and DAPA programs. Surprisingly, however, his equally profound measures to improve the legal immigration system have been lost in the GOP’s ongoing Sturm und Drang over what they dub “Executive Amnesty.” Among these legal immigration reforms, an almost overlooked November 21, 2014 Presidential Memorandum (“Modernizing and Streamlining the U.S. Immigrant Visa System for the 21st Century“) invited the submission of individual and stakeholder recommendations to improve legal immigration. If the Obama Administration were to embrace the best of the recommendations submitted in response, many good things would flow from this crowd-sourcing initiative. Without involving or seeking the consent of Congress, the Administration could readily adopt a plethora of path-breaking innovations to our legal immigration system which would profoundly improve how this country welcomes and benefits from foreign strivers, entrepreneurs, scientists, students, investors and other worthy contributors. As my colleagues, Gary Endelman and Cyrus Mehta put it recently:

At the end of the day, immigration policy is not only, or even primarily, about the immigrants but about how the United States can attract and retain the best and the brightest regardless of nationality who wish to join us in writing the next chapter of our ongoing national story. There are two ways to achieve progress. Congress can change the law, which it persists in refusing to do, or the President can interpret the existing law in new ways, which he has done.

The November 14 memorandum directed the Secretaries of Homeland Security and State to solicit proposals from stakeholders and the public to modernize the legal immigration and visa system. The Secretaries of DHS and DOS would then evaluate the proposals so submitted in consultation with several Cabinet members (the Attorney General, and the Secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, and Education), and other federal officials (the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the Director of the National Economic Council, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, the Director of the Domestic Policy Council, and the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy). The official invitation to submit ideas took the form of a December 30 Notice of Request for Information, which allowed the submission of up to 30 pages of commentary by January 29. The comment period has closed, and the proposals are now posted online for all to see. Some of the most thoughtful suggestions, accompanied in many cases by convincing citation to legal authority, came from members of the Alliance of Business Immigration Lawyers (ABIL); members of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA); a collection of 16 business-immigration stakeholder organizations (the 16); two individuals, attorney Nicole Kersey of Kersey Immigration Compliance (KIC), and Don Crocetti, managing member of Immigration Integrity Group, LLC (IIG) who formerly served as Chief of the Fraud Detection and Nationality Security Directorate (FDNS) of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS); the American Immigration Council (the Council); the Society for Human Resource Management through its strategic affiliate, the Council for Global Immigration (CFGI); the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (the Chamber); the International Medical Graduate Taskforce (IMGT); the Center for American Progress (CAP) and the Global Workers Justice Alliance (GWJA). Here are just a few of the many recommendations (accessible through the hyperlinks in the preceding paragraph) which I believe would comprehensively transform and improve America’s decrepit immigration system:Improve access to justice. ABIL, AILA and the Council urged the Department of State (DOS or State) and U.S. Customs & Border Protection (CBP) to grant every individual interviewed by a federal immigration official the right to the representation of an attorney (either in person or by electronic means, but still at no cost to the government). The right to counsel would extend to (a) visa applicants who are interviewed by a consular officer, (b) applicants seeking admission to the U.S. during secondary or deferred inspection who are interviewed by a CBP officer, and (c) petitioners seeking immigration benefits who are interviewed in the course of FDNS site visits by USCIS investigators. ABIL also urged State and DHS to create a pilot system of binding review of decisions by consular officers to refuse certain categories of visas (all immigrant visas and nonimmigrant refusals under the E-1 treaty trader, E-2 treaty investor, E-3 Australian specialty occupation worker, H-1B specialty occupation, L-1 intracompany transferee and O-1 extraordinary ability visa categories).Develop a single body of “immigration common law” and revitalize the advisory opinion process. ABIL proposed the creation of a single administrative tribunal to hear appeals from decisions and adjudications by all federal immigration agencies, thereby consolidating the work of multiple federal appellate panels and reducing the complexity and inconsistency of precedent and non-precedent immigration law decisions. ABIL also proposed that State publish all of its now-secret Advisory Opinions which guide consular officers in visa determinations and that USCIS adopt a published IRS-style private letter ruling process whereby the party seeking written guidance on the legal consequences of a particular set of facts would receive a binding interpretation but other stakeholders might benefit from the agency’s non-binding guidance in analogous circumstances.Prohibit relitigating prior USCIS decisions granting employment-based immigration benefits. The 16, the Chamber, AILA and CFGI proposed that USCIS give “binding deference” to the agency’s previous grants of employment authorization whenever a petition seeking extension of the employer’s petition and of the worker’s nonimmigrant status involves the same employer, same employee, and same job duties, unless an adjudicator can establish, and articulate with specificity, fraud or clear gross error. Such a change would necessarily reduce the burdensome and frequent requests for additional evidence (RFEs) and introduce a welcome measure of reliability, consistency and predictability to the process of extending the work permission of nonimmigrant employees. To make this change, USCIS would need to adopt IIG’s proposal to speedily transition away from its “antiquated paper environment, supported primarily by legacy INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] mainframe systems and databases with little to no interface or advance search or analytics capabilities” and instead it must “automate” “all USCIS systems and filing processes”.Hasten the issuance of work visas, immigrant visas, green cards, work authorization and international travel permission. Many commenters (including ABIL, AILA, CFGI and the 16) proposed that State and USCIS adopt a range of proposals which, in various ways, would (a) count only the principal worker and not the dependents when reporting and applying the cutoff date on available immigrant visas as announced in State’s Visa Bulletin, (b) recapture the hundreds of thousands of immigrant visas from prior years that were unused and thus squandered because of inadequacies in the way green-card quotas were allocated between DOS and USCIS, (c) allow for much earlier acceptance of employment-based applications for adjustment of status, thereby hastening the issuance of Employment Authorization Documents (EADs) and Advance Parole travel authorization, and (d) plug gaps in the grant of employment authorization by extending it for longer periods or on an interim basis to more categories, e.g., persons in U visa status, applicants for renewal of EADs, and persons holding employment-based work-visa status in nonimmigrant categories omitted by the 240-day period of interim employment authorization allowed in the Form I-9 (Employment Eligibility Verification) regulations. GWJA also urged that USCIS, upon approving an immigrant visa petition, automatically forward the notice of appearance (Form G-28) to State’s National Visa Center so that prolonged delays now experienced in the recognition of attorney representation would be eliminated.Clarify and liberalize the rules on immigration successorship in interest. ABIL proposed that DHS and DOS adopt a successor in interest principle that would (a) expand the range of situations in which corporate restructurings are recognized for immigration purposes, thereby allowing uninterrupted employment authorization and the preservation of pipeline employment-based immigrant visa and adjustment of status benefits, and (b) dispense with current USCIS interpretations whereby immigration successorship requires an “assumption of all or some liabilities, whether they be solely immigration-related liabilities or liabilities associated with the occupational classifications of the particular beneficiaries affected by the change in corporate circumstances.”Adopt improvements to promote investment, entrepreneurship, job creation and business innovation. Many of the commenters suggested changes to spur investments, business activity, innovation and job creation. CFGI proposed the creation of a “Robust Trusted Employer Program” which would allow faster and more streamlined approvals of requests for immigration benefits submitted by “any employer that can demonstrate a track record of compliance with applicable [immigration] laws.” ABIL urged the Obama Administration to “create an agency to support and protect the economic benefits of immigration within the Department of Commerce or another cabinet department.” AILA and ABIL proposed that DHS “create explicit immigration protections and benefits for small businesses,” e.g., by (a) rescinding the Neufeld Memorandum (which effectively abolished the distinction, long recognized in precedent decisions that, for immigration purposes, a corporation is to be considered distinct from its owners), (b) clarifying that the customary attributes of start-ups and small businesses are not necessarily indicia of fraud, and (c) adopting in formal policy guidance and ultimately in regulations the formal recognition that the characteristics of start-ups as set forth in USCIS’s Entrepreneur in Residence training materials are acceptable examples of legitimate forms of business operations and activities. ABIL and AILA also proposed numerous improvements that should be implemented by USCIS’s EB-5 Immigrant Investment Program Office (IPO) in order to promote the IPO’s announced goals of enhanced transparency of eligibility criteria, speedier case processing and the safeguarding of EB-5 program integrity.Enhance immigrant and nonimmigrant protections and promote immigration integrity. A number of commenters suggested that DHS and DOS should ease eligibility requirements or offer enhanced benefits to individuals seeking or holding a particular visa status. IMGT offered a range of suggestions to improve the lot of foreign medical graduates (FMGs) including, among other proposals, H-1B cap gap relief for FMGs, clarification that J-2 dependents of FMGs are not subject to the two-year, home-country, physical-presence requirement applicable to J-1 FMGs, and clearer and more expansive interpretations of (a) “affiliated or related” parties eligible for exemption from the annual H-1B quota, and (b) requirements for the physician national interest waiver. GWJA also suggested several improvements, including, for example, enhanced protections available to individuals who have applied for or hold U visa status, job “portability” benefits for H-2B workers, greater age-out protections for dependents in VAWA cases, and an obligation undertaken by DOS to provide more explicit statements of the actual grounds for a visa refusal and not merely uninformative citation to the general ineligibility ground of denial found at Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) § 214(b). CAP urged DHS and DOS to improve transparency and reporting of data on LGBT individuals who seek or hold refugee admission or asylum status. Don Crocetti of IIG suggested that USCIS automate immigration case processing and build “a person and organization centric data system complete with electronic filing and web-based interviews” — a system which “contains advanced and ‘Big Data’ analytics to support a proactive anti-fraud operation.”Freeze I-9 and worksite enforcement until USCIS has decided all DACA/DAPA applications for work permission. Nicole Kersey of KIC, along with ABIL, proposed that the DHS Secretary cause U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to suspend and defer, on a temporary basis, worksite investigations and enforcement of certain employer-sanctions provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (relating to the maintenance of Forms I-9 and the duty of employers to refrain from knowingly hiring or continuing to employ unauthorized workers). The temporary freeze would end, they proposed, once USCIS certifies that it has decided all applications for work permission under the DACA and DAPA program. The purpose of the proposed deferral of ICE enforcement, Ms. Kersey and ABIL explained, would be to avoid actions that might undermine the President’s goals of maintaining family unity in mixed-status households and encouraging eligible DACA and DAPA applicants to “get right with the law” and “come out of the shadow.” These laudable Presidential purposes, the proponents maintained, would be jeopardized if ICE — by virtue of a worksite enforcement action — were to impose a duty on employers to fire unauthorized workers who may ultimately receive employment permission.Improve Federal Immigration IT Infrastructure. AILA suggested several IT enhancements, including USCIS acceptance of online payment of filing fees, standardization of web-published protocols and response times to email queries submitted to consular officers at posts worldwide, and permitting additional functionality in the “myUSCIS” Case Status Online query system by allowing access to the actual RFE or notices of intent to revoke or deny a petition issued rather than merely viewing a report that an RFE or notice has been issued (which must then await delivery by snail mail). In addition, ABIL and AILA suggested that — in the words of the AILA comment — “As USCIS continues to develop ELIS [the USCIS Electronic Immigration System] and expand its functionality to other forms and uses, it would be in the agency’s best interest to reach out to vendors and large-scale users, including AILA, for regular usability testing and feedback.” ABIL proposed a variety of additional IT suggestions:

DHS (USCIS and CBP) DOL (the Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC)) and DOS (the Bureau of Consular Affairs [BCA]) should work to achieve interoperability for users so that employers, petitioners and applicants for immigration benefits, lawyers, law firms and organizational stakeholders such as universities need not be forced to re-enter the same data into disparate, siloed systems;

All possible questions in online forms that function as a database, such as the BCA’s DS-160, where distinct questions appear as determined based on earlier answers to prior questions, should be published and available in full with a cross-referencing of questions and answers by visa category so that the public, as contemplated by the Paperwork Reduction Act, can know in advance what information to assemble.

All electronic forms should provide the opportunity to expand on or clarify an answer to any question on the form in data fields permitting unlimited entry of text, since many questions cannot be answered truthfully and fully with, for example, a simple “yes” or “no” reply. Many such questions require the application of fact to law and thus require an answer that is consistent with applicable law. As currently configured, these forms invite a later accusation by federal immigration authorities of, inter alia, a willful, material misrepresentation under INA § 212(a)(6)(C), a falsely made document under INA § 274C(f), or a false statement under 18 U.S.C. § 1001;

The attorney for an employer (with authorization of the subject individual employee or family member) should be allowed to access and download the electronic I-94. As the CBP e-I-94 system now is configured, only the applicant for admission who is ultimately admitted, or his or her attorney, can access the database and retrieve the I-94. Many large corporations centralize the management of their foreign employee’s maintenance of immigration status through counsel. Without access to the e-I-94 system by corporate counsel, this process is severely impeded and the prospect of an inadvertent violation of the unlawful-presence 3- and 10-year bars could occur; and

Online visa application[s] and [USCIS] immigration forms should allow the user to move from one screen to the next without completion of all relevant data requested in the screen. Often, some but not all information is not presently available. The online systems should also allow saving, downloading, and emailing partially completed forms so that information already provided need not be required to be re-entered again.

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Since other commenters’ proposals were not summarized, and additional comments of the submitters identified above may have been given unintentional short shrift, I encourage all immigration stakeholders to spend as much time as possible reading the full set of comments and then, using all forms of social and traditional media, to focus public attention on the innumerable ways that DHS, DOS and the several agencies that administer federal immigration laws can optimize our nation’s legal immigration system. It is broken; so let’s make the Administration fix it.

In the 1997 film, Liar Liar, Jim Carrey starred as Fletcher Reede, a scruples-free lawyer whose young son, Max, wishes that, for just one day, his dad would tell the truth. Max’s wish is granted. Fletcher flips from mendacity to veracity. He tries persistently to lie; his Silly-Putty® face contorts wildly, but he can only blurt out truths. Hilarity ensues, life lessons are learned, and the Reede family lives blissfully ever after. Fast forward to Washington DC, November 2014. Young Max, now a manly Millennial, remorseful for having sat out the mid-term elections, and disgusted with the politicians’ threats and counter-threats on immigration, makes a new wish: For just one day, one Republican (John Boehner) and one Democrat (Barack Obama) must only speak the truth. The wish is granted. The usual round of press conferences and TV appearances are held, and questions are asked of President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner.Mr. President, you’ve said that, given the failure of Congress to enact immigration reforms, you will use the full extent of your legal authority and take executive actions before the end of the year to fix our nation’s immigration system. What specific actions will you take?

President Obama:

Before I answer that, let me admit a few things. I promised to push for immigration reform during my first year in office, but didn’t. I blamed Congress for failing to enact immigration reforms, while claiming that I lacked authority to disregard the laws on the books. Hoping to show Republicans that I could be tough on immigration, I became the “Deporter in Chief.” But then, a few months before the last Presidential election, I did what I said I could not do and authorized the Homeland Security Department to roll out a program for Dreamers known as DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). That move brought out Latino voters in droves and may well have been the proximate cause of my reelection. Pressed by immigration activists to stop breaking up families by deporting parents, I asked the Secretary of Homeland Security to study alternatives. Then I deferred action on his report, and then I deferred executive action in the summer, and deferred again in the fall at the behest of endangered Democrats who worried that they’d be trounced in the mid-terms. It didn’t matter. They were trounced anyway, and I’m now facing a Congress controlled by the GOP. So having learned that I must talk truth on immigration, here’s what I’m going to do very soon. I’ll order reforms that allow a 2.5 million to 5 million undocumented to receive work and travel permits (except for recent arrivals, hardened criminals and terrorists). I’ll authorize measures that will speed up — ever so slowly — the immigrant visa backlog. I may allow early filing of employment-based green card applications. This would grant professional and skilled foreign workers and their families work and travel permission sooner than now. But they’ll still be stuck in the waiting line just as long and won’t get green cards until their visa numbers are current. I could recapture 600,000 or more immigrant visa numbers that my own and previous administrations squandered by not using them before the end of each fiscal year. I could say that spouses and kids would not be counted in the employment-based green card quota. I could make USCIS stop denying benefits to people on technicalities or imagined grounds of ineligibility. I haven’t decided on these yet. Of course, I’ll describe these executive actions as generous within the bounds of the law. I know that I’ll be accused of having bypassed the Republican Congress on immigration reform. Some in the media will say it’s ”Caesarism” or “caudillismo.” But others will come to my defense. Still, the constitutional law professor in me worries that I may be going too far, and that some future Republican president will use my action as precedent to ignore the Constitution and take the country off a cliff.

Well Max got his wish and two seasoned pols told the truth for a day. Does it change anything? Not really; we know these truths to be self-evident. The ultimate truth is that howsoever President Obama’s executive actions and the Republicans’ reactions on immigration play out, the American people must stand up and hold our “leaders” accountable to fix our dysfunctional immigration system through well-conceived legislation.